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3htrk£jj unh tlye War 

A SERMON 



BY THE 



REV. CHARLES WOOD, D.D. 







Preached in the 
CHURCH OF THE COVENANT 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 



SUNDAY EVENING 

JANUARY 24. 1915 

Piinled by Requett 



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TURKEY AND THE WAR 

"For thou may est be no longer steward." Luke 16:2. 

The fatal error in religion, that has made the Turkish 
Empire and all other Mohammedan lands faithless to their 
God-given stewardship, is putting Resignation in the 
place of Responsibility. This has honeycombed all 
ambition and robbed man of every motive that makes 
for progress. The Moslem stands, looking back to 
Mohammed and his successors for precedents or com- 
mands, but he never looks around to discover possibili- 
ties of improving either his own condition or the con- 
dition of anyone else. 

A sluggish South American, when he is asked to 
exert himself, may respond with extreme politeness: 
"Manana," — tomorrow. But a Mohammedan, while less 
plausible and promising, has a more effective escape from 
the disagreeable duty of exerting himself in personal or 
public reforms and betterments in the single word Kismet 
— fate — that word lifts him into an altitude so lofty that 
emotion is chilled, desire is frozen, and obligation is put in 
cold storage. 



1 



"Whatever is, is right." This is the philosophy that 
governs the Moslem's entire life in the minutest detail. Is 
it a fire? Is it a flood? If it be a fire, he waits, completely 
resigned, till it has burned his house down or itself out. 
"It is the will of Allah." Is it a flood? He will watch it 
with the same resignation till the waters pass out to 
sea and the river returns to its old channel. "It is the 
will of Allah." 

Therefore, the Turk does nothing willingly for him- 
self or humanity. He does not build bridges. He 
takes the ford that Allah prepared for him. He does 
not make roads. He fellow's a cattle path or the bed 
of a river. He does not erect hospitals in his cities, 
but he says of himself — he is extremely consistent — as 
he says of his wife and of his children: "If it be the 
will of Allah we shall get well; if it be the will of Allah 
we shall die." He does not pave the streets of his 
cities — the city itself is an inconsistency in his creed 
which he does not stop to explain — but he is 
consistent in leaving streets in the natural state which 
is doubtless most pleasing to Allah. 

However kindly sympathetic and benevolent such a man 
may be by nature when he is convinced — and he is always 
open to such a conviction — that it is the will of Allah his 
Christian neighbor, with whom he is on the best of 
terms, should be removed, his only question is will 
Allah be most pleased to have him removed with a 
knife or a gun? Put such a man in the ranks with 
50,000 other men of the same sort and creed and you 
have the kind of an army before which Europe has 
trembled more than once. 



Mohammed, the founder of this religion that controls 
one-tenth of the world's inhabitants more autocratically 
than any other religion except Christian Science, was, in 
the broadest meaning of the word, a seer. Carlyle went 
so far in his extreme generosity as to give him a place 
not only among his heroes, but among his prophets. 
Carlyle thinks that in a world made by God and not the 
devil it is impossible that quackery and fatuity 
can be permanent!}' successful. "A false man found a 
religion?" he cries. "Why, a false man cannot even 
build a brick house." "If he does not know and 
know truly the properties of mortar, burnt clay and 
what else he works in, it is no house that he makes, but 
a rubbish heap" — as, alas, the builders of the first tower 
of this church found to their cost. 

Carlyle will not for a moment consent to say that 
Mohammed was a conscious imposter. He was a seer, 
That is, he saw deeply into certain phases of truth. He 
looked at the great, wide ocean of sand around him and 
from it came the conception to him of the illimitable, 
the infinite. He looked at the stars in their countless 
numbers and felt, as Napoleon felt, when he waved his 
hand across the sky and said to his infidel marshals : 
"Who made all this?" Mohammed did not believe that 
"all this" had been made by men or by demigods. "God 
is God;" and the great words thrilled his soul and swayed 
his whole being. "God is God!" But, alas, he went still 
further and said: "Mohammed is his prophet." He took 
a monopoly and claimed the copyright on the interpreta- 
tion of God forever. 

The symbol of Mohammedanism, the crescent and the 
star, is scientifically and psychologically pathetically per- 



feet. For Mohammed believed that the half is better than 
the whole. A semi-circle with a single star, rather than a 
circle in the center of countless constellations in a system 
of which it was but a part, was naturally his chosen sign. 

To Mohammed not only wa.s half a loaf better than 
no bread, but it was better than all the bread of 
the whole loaf. To him the Old Testament was bet- 
ter than the Old and New Testaments together. He 
thought a Moslem not only of more value than all the 
rest of the world, but of more value alone than he would be 
with the rest of the world added to him. He believed 
that the Will is of more importance, not only than 
any other single faculty of man, but of more importance 
than all the faculties and powers of man — reason, affection 
and will — under the harmonious sway of a predominant 
passion like love. 

He built, therefore, his great structure on a single 
virtue, Resignation, and on two vices, Slavery and 
Polygamy. He promised! Paradise to every soldier 
fighting either to slay or to enslave. He promised his 
soldiers that if they fell with the sword in their hands 
they should be caught up by angels and carried into a para- 
dise where they should be served by innumerable slaves and 
wives. He permitted only four wives here on earth, 
but there were to be no restrictions in Paradise. 
Wine was forbidden the faithful here, but there they should 
drink until they had satisfied an unquenchable thirst. 
With a faith like that, a faith so admirably adapted to 
a limited spirituality, and to an unlimited sensuality, 
was it any wonder that his soldiers went conquer- 
ing and to conquer? 



Before these Moslem hordes, equipped with the best 
implements of destruction known to the time, European 
soldiers offered a feeble resistance. Moslem armies 
swept around the shores of the Mediterranean, taking all 
Arabia and Northern Africa,, Constantinople, and 
Greece, overwhelming and extinguishing the finest culture 
the world had ever seen. Conquering at last Spain 
itself, they held it for 700 years. In these Moslem 
wars, and such as these, it is said that more than 10,000,- 
000 non-Moslems were slaughtered. But every error 
— for Carlyle was right no false religion can perma- 
nently endure — every error carries its doom in its own 
bosom. A religion emphasizing but one virtue, Resig- 
nation, could make conquests but no converts. Wher- 
ever Mohammedanism went it was a marauder and a 
despoiler. The Janisaries, you say, were the sons of Chris- 
tian mothers and fathers, but they were torn from the 
bosoms of their mothers when they were babes and were 
inoculated with the virus of hate for all Christians, most of 
all for their own relatives. 

A religion founded on one virtue and two vices could 
not permanently endure. Mohammedanism reached its 
high water mark when it swept through Spain into France, 
to the very walls of Tours, where Charles Martel, the 
Frankish king, struck it a stinging, staggering blow with 
his Thor-like hammer. Nine hundred years later, beneath 
the walls of Vienna, John Sobieski, King of Poland, in- 
flicted a still more decisive defeat. 

The destroying flood that so long threatened European 
and Christian civilization slowly receded leaving a detritus 
of mud and ruins which will not wholly disappear for many 
centuries. 



Spain was the first of all the flooded lands to reappear. 
Then came Greece and the Balkans. In 1912 it seemed 
as if there was to be nothing left of Turkey in Europe, 
yet, thanks to the hot temper and shortsighted selfish- 
ness of her enemies, she still holds a little strip around 
Constantinople. But Asia Minor with her seven 
churches, some of which were founded by Paul and to 
all of which John wrote : Tarsus, the birthplace of 
Paul; Antioch, the place where the disciples were first 
called Christians ; Damascus, where Paul had the 
heavenly vision to which he was always obedient ; Beth- 
lehem, the town of the cradle; Jerusalem, with its sepul- 
chre, and its cross — over all these today the crescent floats. 

Even in Shelley's time, when the wave was receding 
much less swiftly than in our own, Shelley, who loved 
to call himself a skeptic, sang, and a note of faith and hope 
sounds in his song: 

"The moon of Mohammed 
Arose and it shall set 

While blazoned as on Heaven's immortal noon 
The cross leads generations on." 

Looking out over the Golden Horn the night Ger- 
many declared war against Russia we saw a crescent 
with one star of glittering silver blazing close to it. To- 
gether they seemed to dominate heaven and earth. As we 
looked we wondered, like Franklin in Independence 
Hall, in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress 
was assembled to form, if possible, a Constitution for 
the United States. "Seeing a sun carved on the back of 
the chair in which the speaker sat, I wondered," 
Franklin said, "as I looked, whether it was a setting 
or rising sun, but as I gazed long I felt 'sure that it was 



a rising sun, and that it foreboded prosperity tor the new 
union which had just been consummated." So we won- 
dered if the crescent, gleaming threateningly in the sky, 
was waxing or waning. Convinced that it was waning, 
we saw in it, not a prophecy, but a symbol of Moham- 
medanism — the half moon waning to wax no more. 

The Turks of the better class in Constantinople have 
shared this to their bitter conviction since Turkey began the 
war with Russia. One of the wisest of the Turkish states- 
men said, when told the first shot had been fired, "This is the 
end, our fate is sealed." The voice of the Sheikh-Ul- 
Islam, though it carries much further than that of any 
Sultan, has not been effective in calling the Moham- 
medans to a holy war. In vain the prophet's banner has 
been unfurled. In vain the sacred carpet has been ex- 
hibited. In vain the sword of Mohammed II, the Con- 
queror, with which every Sultan is invested in the great 
mosque of Eyoub, has been pointed at the infidel's breast. 
The Mohammedan world is unresponsive. Her one virtue, 
Resignation, calls to her soul with a louder voice than 
the blended tones of the Sheikh-Ul-Islam and the Sul- 
tan. "The lines have fallen to me in pleasant 
places," the Turk says. "I love Constantinople, 
Egypt, and India too. We Moslems are very much at 
home wherever the British flag flies. We feel even 
more secure under the cross of St. George than under 
the crescent of our Prophet." 

There are more Moslems in India than there are in 
Persia and the whole Turkish Empire, including Tripoli. 
Tunis, Algiers and Morocco, and their Resignation is com- 
plete. The Moslem says : "Did not our great Moham- 
med teach us we should always know whether our caliph 



had been selected in Heaven or on earth?" The caliph 
who reigns over the largest number of the faithful, what- 
ever his name or title, is the God-chosen caliph." King 
George reigns over more Mohammedans than all the sultans, 
khedives and padishahs. May it not be, without changing 
his religion, George V shall soon be able to call himself, 
"King' of Great Britain, Emperor of India, and Caliph of 
the Mohammedan world?" 

When the Turk recrosses the Bosphorus into Asia, 
what will he leave behind him in Europe? It is to be 
hoped he will leave Sancta Sophia — that glorious tem- 
ple of Christendom — uninjured. He will leave, it is true, 
a few beautiful palaces which he built in Spain, a large 
number of exquisite mosques throughout Turkey — but 
no discoveries, no inventions, no improvements. Con- 
stantinople has been greatly improved in the last two 
years. There are, in some of the streets, excellent 
pavements, lines of trolleys and electric lights. In a few 
houses there are telephones. With these innovations 
the Turk had nothing to do. Foreign capital, foreign 
energy and foreign initiative have done it all. The Turk 
will leave behind him no structures consecrated to science 
■or art, to philanthropy or humanity. 

After recrossing the Bosphorus he will mount his 
horse on the Asiatic side just as his ancestors 500 years 
ago mounted their horses — horses of the same blood; 
and there are no better in the world. But his family 
will follow him in a covered cart, the counterpart of the 
cart his ancestors used when they came up out of 
Asia into Europe. The wheels will groan and shriek 
like the wheels of his forefather's carts. He will cross 
lines of railway, some running from Scutari, a short 



distance into the country, or it may be he will strike 
the line which is already being built to connect London, 
Paris and Berlin with Bagdad and Calcutta. But 
he had nothing to do with it or any of these lines he would 
scornfully confess, and if he could have his way he 
would shed no tears if they were all wiped out. 

He will leave behind him in Constantinople a number 
of schools which were intended primarily for teaching 
the Will of Allah — as contained in the Koran — noth- 
ing else. It is an open question whether even these schools 
would ever have been established if it had not been that 
seventy years ago Cyrus Hamlin and men like him 
came from America to Constantinople. At that time 
there was no school in the Turkish Empire, and not 
one school book. 

The Turk will leave behind him, up the Bosphorus, a 
great college in which there are over 600 students. A 
college to which an American, Mr. Robert, gave $200,- 
000, and to which another American, Mr. John S. Ken- 
nedy, gave $1,500,000. In that college many Greeks, 
Armenians, Bulgarians and some Turks have been edu- 
cated. The light that has come from that college has been 
like the discharge of an electric battery upon vegetation 
which, it is said, so stimulates growth that the fruitage is a 
hundred-fold what it was before. Greece has felt it, 
Roumania has felt it, and Bulgaria has been transformed 
by it. 

When the Bulgarians, a little while ago, thought of 
sending a representative for the first time to the United 
States they perforce selected a graduate of Robert Col- 
lege, and then, in order that they might be quite sure 
that they would be adequately and satisfactorily repre- 



sented, they took not only a graduate but a professor 
for forty-two years in that college. But the Turk does not 
love Robert College. He would dynamite it tonight 
if he could. He does not want anything so disturbing 
as an educational institution in his philosophy. 

Behind him too, near Robert College, he will leave 
another and still more offensive centre of western science 
and learning — a woman's college with 250 students. 
This is revolutionary and subversive of all his Koran 
teaches. "Educate a man and you educate an individual. 
Educate a woman and you educate a family," it has 
been said. What is to become of the religion of the 
Prophet when families are educated? The retreating 
Turk will find forty-four American schools, and 25,000 
students in Asia Minor. He will find American colleges at 
Marsovan, Kharput, Aintab, Tarsus, Marash and Smyrna. 
On the Syrian coast at Beyrout he will see another American 
college with 900 students and thirty-five American teachers 
and forty native teachers. 

As the Turk journeys, wherever he finds a house in which 
there are either the decencies or the conveniences of 
civilization, he will know that such a house exists in the 
Turkish Empire only because either the father or the 
mother of the family living there was educated in an 
American or European school. 

As he passes through the fields — foi there are no 
roads made by the Turk — he will see his brethren using 
the agricultural implements of Abraham's time, tickling 
the soil with a sharp stick as a plow. There are few tools 
anywhere in the Orient that have not come from the United 
States. He may cross slopes of mountains in which there 
are inexhaustible veins of coal and copper, of iron and oil, 

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but if he should travel that country for the next 500 years 
— the people remaining Moslems supposedly, all those re- 
sources would be left, as they have been left for the last 700 
years, untouched and undeveloped. 

When the Turk is once more and forever across the 
Bosphorus it will be easier to help him than it is now. 
As an individual he has many attractive qualities. His 
one virtue, Resignation, has blossomed out into many 
kinds of beautiful fruit, such as courtesy, geniality, clean- 
liness, truthfulness, and self respect, alas, carried to 
the very verge of superciliousness — an extravagant and 
abnormal sense of his personal superiority. But he has 
been "cribbed, cabined and confined" in the most con- 
stricting creed known to man. He is like a palm — call 
it a royal palm if you like — planted in a pot. Break 
the pot, he will be more ready to have it done when he 
crosses the Bosphorus than he is now, and he may grow 
to an unrecognizable stature. The hour of his retreat 
from Europe may thus become the hour of his advance 
into civilization. 

He may be taught then that while Resignation is fun- 
damental, it is onl) r preparatory, like the removing of 
the stones and roots by which the soil has been encum- 
bered, in order that the good seed may be planted. He 
may be taught then that Evolution, of which he has 
heard something and which he believes is the European 
panacea, does not evolve unless it begins with reforma- 
tion and is carried on by education, and that men and 
women alike are to receive this education. 

The first convert that Mohammed made was his wife. 
Khadija. Alas that he should have been so ungrateful ! 
He made no place in his paradise for a woman. He 

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teaches, at least by inference, that a woman needs no 
paradise. Here in our country our women are troubled 
because they have no vote. In Turkish lands their 
only trouble is that they have no souls. 

Poor Khadija, his first convert, without a soul! 
A highly educated French woman, a few years or so 
ago, went to Constantinople and talked to a Turkish 
woman of high rank about religion, but the Turkish 
woman said : "Why, I thought religion was a matter 
only for men." Here in this country there are thou- 
sands of men who think that religion is a matter only 
for women. There is no hope, no possibility of radical 
reformation for Turkey, so Sir Edwin Pease, who 
has spent his whole life in Constantinople in most sym- 
pathetic contact with the Turk, says, till these two vices 
upon which Mohammedanism is built — polygamy and 
slavery — are eradicated. The Moslem women must have 
schools in which they shall all be taught they have souls, and 
that the soul withers in polygamy and slavery. When the 
Turk finds himself in Asia Minor he will be willing, per- 
haps, to listen to what the 20th century has to say to him 
about the advantages of education. 

He will be ready also to listen when he is told that 
Resignation is but a half circle, a half hinge; that man 
must advance from Resignation to Realization if he is 
to attain to the highest and best possible to him ; that 
"Through love, through hope, through faith's transcend- 
ent dower, we feel that we are greater than we know." 
Only as man has that hope of being something greater 
than he knows, "only as he apprehends that for which 
also he is apprehended — the rheasure of the stature 
of the fulness of Christ — can he come to "the perfect 

12 



man." He shall be taught, and he will be ready to 
listen then, that God is God, but He is the father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, whom even Mohammed called 
a prophet. 

The retreat of Turkey — that hour of her necessity — 
will be the hour of America's opportunity, not for spolia- 
tion, dismemberment or partition, but for redemption 
and reconstruction. Already w r e have our representa- 
tives in the Turkish Empire. Our "lighthouses," as our 
schools and colleges have been called, are sending out 
their rays on that dark and dead coast. Our soldiers 
are there not to kill and wound, but to give first aid to 
the wounded. Our cannon are loaded, not with shrap- 
nel, but like most of our cannon along our coasts, with 
life-lines. It may not be possible even with all our life- 
saving stations and our lifeboats to keep the waterlogged 
ship flying the crescent flag from sinking, but surely we 
shall be able to save thousands of our brothers and sisters 
who stand calling for help upon the storm-swept decks. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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REPORTED BY 
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